Author: Takushu Kimura
The 5.5 Douban score of "Black Panther 2: Long Live Wakanda" and the box office result of not breaking 100 million in 9 days of release mark the market failure that the film has encountered in China, but it is also difficult to say that it is unexpected. Chinese audiences have never really appreciated "Black Panther." In 2018, it caused cultural shocks in North America and the first "Black Panther" in the Oscar seven mentions, in fact, only achieved a Douban score of 6.5 in China, a box office of more than 600 million ("Venom" and "Aquaman" in the same year both had a box office of about 2 billion in China), and simple criticism everywhere based on "dislike zzzq" as the main scoring basis. It's hard to empathize with Wakanda's vision of African futurism.
On the one hand, this "inability to empathize" is easy to understand: under the influence of the continuous export of Western white lifestyles in Europe and the United States in the past century, especially in our social environment far from racial issues, African culture appears to have little "consumability" and hardly arouses our interest in consumption.
An example is reproduced at the beginning of Black Panther 2. After explaining the death of King T'Challa, the film immediately begins a solemn and inspiring memorial ceremony. From the mourning parade to the iconic death celebration ceremony of the West African funeral, the main creative team that won the Oscar for "Best Art Direction" and "Best Costume Team" in the previous film has done an excellent job again, using countless exquisite costume props and ceremony details to show a moving Wakanda-style memorial ceremony.
The memorial to T'Challa, but also to its actor, Chadwick Boseman, who died of colon cancer in 2020, helped kick off the film's real theme: How do we face loss? How to digest the subversive effects of grief on a person? How to define and inherit the spiritual heritage of our loved ones? If rational, secular Western-style modern lifestyles are unable to respond to the dilemma of death, how can African culture inspire us? This theme is all the more pronounced given the disproportionate deaths faced by black people under the influence of systemic racial inequality during the pandemic. Most of the praise for "Black Panther 2" from foreign film media and black groups also focused on the emotional depth of the film.
However, when we enter the cinema with the expectation of "the finale of the fourth phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe" out of the cultural context, the similar theme and rich meaning fade. On various social networks, it is not difficult to see the incomprehensible comments on the design of this opening paragraph, as well as frivolous descriptions such as "underworld scene" and "black people carrying coffins".
In fact, designing "Black Panther 2" as such an emotional journey was not an easy decision. We hardly ever see a heroic protagonist "die" in a superhero movie (rather than fighting to the end and dying for the well-being of all mankind). The departure of the widely respected actor Chadwick Boseman has left "Black Panther" without its core lead role and soul in the main creator. But the film still has several leeway, such as re-casting, or arranging a reason for the character to "leave for a while", or even using a framework such as "multiverse" to introduce more other "Black Panthers". After Chadwick's death, a large number of Marvel fans also launched the topic of #recastTChalla (recasting for "T'Challa") on social networks, hoping that the film would find a new actor to play T'Challa, rather than announcing the death of the character in the story. On change.org, the request for recasting received more than 60,000 signatures.
However, the film ultimately arranges T'Challa's death, and it is explained in the simplest and at the same time the most echoing of Chadwick's off-theatrical fate. And, surprisingly, the film's nostalgia for Chadwick is solemn and restrained, and the opening and closing credits focus on Chadwick's images with only a silent effect, avoiding cheap sensationalism. This is a rare moment when I have such a sincere emotional experience in a superhero movie.
The second clue worth savoring in Black Panther 2 is the struggle of the heroine Shuri (hereinafter referred to as Suri).
From the first part, Suri is a "less Wakanda" Wakanda. She has a high IQ and outstanding talent, is a technical leader in Wakanda, advocates technology and reason, has contempt for "mystery" and "tradition", and does not believe in the existence of gods. In the first part, when a CIA officer who was rescued from Wakanda questions how her gunshot wound "magically healed" in a single day, Suri emphasized, "It's not magic, it's technology." At the beginning of "Black Panther 2", in the black screen before the screen appears, is Su Rui's prayer when her brother was critically ill: "Goddess Buster, time is running out." Allow me to save my brother from his illness, and I will never doubt your existence again. ”
The failure of the goddess Buster to help her bring her brother back further exacerbates her questioning of Wakanda traditions and gods – in the film, after her brother's death, Suri immerses herself in her scientific and technological innovation experiments, which also shows that the balance of faith in her heart has become more and more inclined to science and reason. So when her mother, Queen Ramanda, burned her sacrificial dress by the fire to mourn T'Challa, saying that she felt that T'Challa was still around, Suri poured cold water on her mother, "No, he is not there, all you feel is a projection of your own fantasy, so that you can feel comforted."
The identity of a rational person and a scientist under modernization, and the identity of a member of the royal family and traditional heir of the mysterious African country of Wakanda, two identities have formed a strong tension in Su Rui. This tension breaks out later in the plot, when she takes the heart-shaped grass and goes to a mysterious realm, expecting to see the soul of her mother or brother, but accidentally meets her cousin "Money Leopard" and sociopathic Killmonger. Killmonger asked Suri her difficult question: If you never believed in the existence of the ancestral realm, why did you still take the Lower Heart Grass and pray for power?
The tension of Su Rui's dual identity is a rare focus on the general mental crisis of discrete black people in reality in superhero films. As early as 120 years ago, Du Bois proposed the concept of the dual consciousness of the black, pointing out the duality of the American black identity - "The black man feels his duality: both American and black, so in his black-skinned body there are two souls, two thoughts, two constantly fighting ideals and two irreconcilable fighting spirits." Black American history is a history of struggle for conscious human dignity, to merge his duality into one and become a better, truer self. "Su Rui's growth arc in "Black Panther 2" is precisely such a struggle.
What we see later in the film is that after a series of struggles, Su Rui finally accepted the "traditional" side in her bones to a certain extent, inherited the spiritual legacy of her brother and mother and the Wakanda-style will to peace, missed the opportunity to kill the villain Namo, and extinguished her desire for revenge to "burn the world".
This is, of course, the established narrative direction of Marvel, and it also makes this work seem conservative from the previous work - in the first "Black Panther", although Killmonger's plan for revenge on the Western world was eventually extinguished, his dissatisfaction with Wakanda's previous isolationism and radical ideas for black compatriots in the world greatly influenced King T'Challa, making Wakanda go to the route of opening up to the outside world and actively carrying out international assistance, which can be said to be "he changed Wakanda". Between the two "Black Panthers", from radical to conservative, of course, there are various factors such as the death of the protagonist of the previous work, but it also faithfully symbolizes our intuitive feeling of facing changes in the world from 2018 to 2022. If we say that in 2018, in the face of the beginning of Trump's "reversal" after taking office, we still condemn isolationism with great dissatisfaction and unremitting efforts, optimistically hoping that a beautiful narrative of globalization will be repaired; By 2022, under the aggressiveness of the ongoing pandemic, war and economic crisis, condemnation and optimism have become exhausting and unrealistic, and the themes of this phase of Black Panther and Marvel have moved towards "appeasement", "forgiveness" and "letting go".
Black Panther 2 certainly wasn't a perfect superhero movie, and the story building that was reinvented after Chadwick's death looked rushed and overloaded. The newly emerged underwater kingdom of Talokan, like Wakanda, is an unknown hideaway, a society that escaped slavery and the capitalist process because of its diaspora. The main creative team's visual creation of Talocan is as good as ever. However, two powerful nation-states that had escaped the brutal capitalist process fought each other (at the provocation of the United States); The West, represented by the United States, which was directly projected as a villain at the beginning of the film, is also invisible in most of the plot advancement later. Perhaps for the black creators of the "Black Panther" series, substituting real-world international political relations into the creation of stories is not their most natural and sensitive awareness of issues, and it is difficult to handle them perfectly.
But I still think Black Panther 2 is a great movie, or that the Black Panther series is still the best superhero movie. It takes us back to step through the rupture of history and experience the social picture of Wakanda: its history is outside the mainstream Western narrative of linear modern processes, but it is still strong, civilized, has its own "modernity", respects women, emphasizes love, and has a light from the past and from the future in its eyes. In this sense, our inability to empathize with "Black Panther" is incomprehensible.